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Comment by midnitewarrior | Hacker News Reader

Why do this when http://bitbucket.com will host private git repos for free? They also have have Large File Storage implemented as well.

I use GitHib client using BitBucket for repo hosting with LFS and it works great, no need to host anything.

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> Why do this when http://bitbucket.com will host private git repos for free?

Because you never know when one of these online services will suffer an outage, suffer a security breach that leasks your private repos or email & credentials, or even lose your data entirely. The fact that the service is free doesn't mean that it doesn't come without potential issues.

But... you are using another online service to host the service yourself, no? And presumably they are also throwing in backups and redundancy of some sort... certainly it would take you a minute to set those things up, test them, monitor they are working... And isn't GitHub basically like everyone's resume these days?

I don't know... at some point you sort of just have to trust someone... be it the hosting provider, or the service provider. And I'm old... but I've had to untangle issues with CVS / VSS / SVN / etc... over the years I don't want anything to do with that crap -- if I can punt it to someone else to manage I'm OK paying some tiny subscription fee.

I think there's been one day in the last ~10 years when I couldn't use GitHub. To me that seems worth the $20 a month, or whatever they charge now.

It's especially sad because git is distributed and every time there's a GitHub outage I hear online some teams are blocked for the day. But everyone has the whole repo. You're not screwed like if your SVN or Perforce server goes down. Anyone could become the new "remote to push to / pull from" until the outage is resolved, or you could set up one of these bare repos somewhere pretty quick. When the outage is resolved someone just pushes to the original and you're all fine.

IME, the popular-remote-service-is-down panics mostly seem to apply in web development world, where apparently any cool project must have an insane number of dependencies, no local failover or caching, and production build/test/deployment processes that are intimately connected to those dependencies that have no local equivalents. GitHub goes down, their entire CI and deployment system falls apart, and no-one has any idea what any of their fancy cloud-hosted doodads was actually doing at the underlying level of the Git repos or which files need to go where on the servers, so they don't know where to start with recovery...

This is what happens when people cargo-cult git because it's what the cool kids are doing, instead of actually making an informed choice.

S/git/GitHub/

Fixed that for you.

Well, that too, but the issue here (thinking that a central repo being offline means you can't use your decentralized version control system) shows that they don't understand git in any form.

I think it's honestly that some people think Git === GitHub, or that GitHub has some magic secret sauce that makes things work.

My company uses github, and it's been down enough to significantly impact work about a dozen times in the past 3 years. There were periods before that where github would be down enough to cause CI or CD builds to fail on a daily basis for months. Still, It's probably worth it for what we pay and the service we get for us to continue using github, even with outages. However, for my personal repos, I host the primary repo on my own infrastructure on my own network on my own property, using only software that is licensed under a free/oss license. I mirror public repos to github as a way of publishing the work, but I'm not going to get caught having to make a tough/expensive decision when Github changes their service plans again.

Why have pictures stored anywhere else when https://facebook.com will host private pictures for free?

Many people (including me) like the idea of self-hosting because we feel more in control.

Why do this when http://bitbucket.com will host private git repos for free?

Not everything needs to be in the cloud, and using any online service run by someone else brings some degree of reliability, security, privacy and longevity risk. Some of us just prefer to avoid those risks, and usually will unless there's some compelling benefit that outweighs them.

Or gitlab.com which offers private repos and also allows you to self host your own gitlab instance if you need to.

Because maybe for security reasons you want to host it on a server internal to your organization's network.

Hosting it yourself means that you don't have to muck with LFS. Want to check in a 7GB file? Go right ahead.

LFS is a tool to use to avoid checking in 7 gb files. If you want to weigh down your repo with binary bloat, don't configure your repo to use LFS.

Have you tried setting up LFS on your self-hosted ssh git repo?

Turns out LFS is designed to authenticate over https and doesn't work at all with ssh credentials out of the box because f* you.

I'm still hoping for a native git feature for large files, so the git-lfs crap can die in a fire.

LFS was developed by GitHub, a company that depends on people thinking it's "too hard" to run their own DVCS repo hosting.

Compare this with the Mercurial LargeFiles extension, which needs nothing more than a line in the .hgrc on each end (client/server) to enable it.

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